


allegorical, interposed

by catpoop



Category: Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
Genre: (another attempt), Canon Universe, Gen, Hallucinations, One Shot, Pastiche, Sickfic, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:47:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27755596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catpoop/pseuds/catpoop
Summary: Piranesi is gripped by the cruel Hand of infection, flayed and sculpted to its whims.
Relationships: Piranesi & The Prophet
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	allegorical, interposed

**Author's Note:**

> sick fick!!

When the first pain lances up his leg, Piranesi takes it to be the Spear of the salt-sprayed Tides. It is nearing Winter, and the Waters always hold within them the chill of the Depths, even when the Sun shines dappled on their backs. The Water crests to mid-thigh as he wades, unfettered, in search of mussels peeking close-mouthed from the Sea, anchored tightly to the Walls and Statues by their silken threads. He has a metal ruler with which to pry the mussels from their resting-places, but then he risks damaging the fine, printed numbers that help him in charting the House.

Piranesi resorts to his bare hands instead, searching for the lone shells that grow away from the Crowd, that fit snugly in his hand as he encloses their small, tapered body and gently twists them from the Wall. He avoids the Crowds – they cut his skin, once.

He places each mussel into a plastic bowl, until it is filled to the brim by their flat, angular shapes, and then he wades out of the Depths of the Lower Halls, to the Staircases that carry him to the drier Halls above. His feet are wet and the marble slippery beneath his soles, but he pays this no mind, nimbly buoyed upwards through the House by the stonework shaping the ground. 

The mussels rattle in their bowl as he cradles them to his belly, and the sea-birds he passes by screech and dance and sing for food.

‘Don’t worry, the mussels are still plentiful in the Lower Halls,’ he reassures them. ‘You may collect them at your own leisure.’

He hears an answering chorus and bobs his head to their tune. The mussels continue to rattle, and one near slides out, frictionless as they are with their smoothed shells and water-dampened edges. Piranesi turns to catch it, and that is when he glimpses the splash of red on the Floor. 

Red like nothing he would hope to see in the House, and red in the glistening shapes of his own naked feet. He does not drop the mussels only by virtue of the tight grip with which he grasps the bowl. The red trails a path back to the Western Doorway from whence he came, and doubtless down the marble Steps, and perhaps swirl immiscible in the shallow Waters.

Piranesi feels his knuckles whiten. He sets the bowl down carefully, out of the way of the red-blood trail and the feasting birds, and inspects his Self for cuts and other injuries. He sees it immediately, so plainly on his brown leg that it was a wonder he had missed it in the first place. A gash, rending his skin in two from mid-shin to ankle, weeping and coalescing to smear the sole of his right foot with that bright, horrendous, Red. He shakily, unthinkingly, pats at the sodden rags of his clothes. No, no, he thinks – these will not do. He will need dry cloth, and Fresh Water, and food and heat and bedding with which to stave off infection. The blood will dry in time, but the wound underneath can easily swell and boil over, upset.

There is no Statue red with the blood of the injured – only Physicians and Healers and Nurses tending to the Sick and Infirm, but Piranesi knows, as certainly as he can recreate those Statues in his mind, that he is to be cautious of infection. He gathers up the mussels and runs, as hastily as he can without fear of slipping, to the Third Northern Hall.

Within his carefully-organised stash of supplies, Piranesi does not have a category for medical equipment, nor has the House or the Other ever bestowed upon him the gift of Healing. He fetches a dry, folded rag and the saucepan, first filling the latter with Fresh Water, then swirling the rag about the tumultuous whirlpool of boiling Water within. His leg throbs all the while.

When the rag has cooled to be comfortable to touch, Piranesi wrings it of its cleaned Water and gently, gently wipes at the reddened-brown smears on his foot and ankle and shin. They sting and pull where the blood has dried to his skin, and it flakes onto the rag yet dyes it dark in thick clots where he continues to bleed. His face is crumpled in pain and distress as the Water in the saucepan darkens and darkens, but when his leg is like brand-new, save for the great gash on one side, Piranesi wraps it in dry rags and fastens them with flexible seaweed and heaves a great sigh. Like the Statue of a Man carrying the World must have felt in the Year that the Ceilings of the Twentieth and Twenty-First North-Eastern Halls collapsed when he was relieved of his great burden.

And as the Man must have had to carry his burden for centuries, Piranesi realises that the afternoon has sped by in an instant, and that the mussels he has collected sit high and dry in their bowl. He floods them with Fresh Water and gathers more dried seaweed for the fire, though he is loath to move from his seat, and cooks himself a dinner before the Night floods the House with Darkness and hunger. The Moon is always present, a guiding beacon, but Piranesi much prefers the warmth of the Sun. 

He lies down in his bed and urges the throbbing in his leg to fade with sleep.

It does not fade. It does not fade even as the sleep slides smoothly from Piranesi’s eyes and he sits upright in bed, pushing the covers aside and rolling the layers of his clothing away to finger the sweat-damp and lightly-stained rag that covers his leg. It is snug and secure under the seaweed and his trousers, but he continues to worry even as it disappears back under its coverings. 

He finds himself unable to climb great heights, though this is not essential when most of his belongings are scattered across the lower levels of Statues. He finds himself unable to walk great distances without the throbbing becoming so distracting and troublesome that it draws him away from his far more important tasks – and this is of much greater concern to him. 

He imagines the skin hot and swollen under the wrappings, and though Piranesi fears to check for himself, he can see the beast ravaging his body and insides from its concealed residence. 

He finally strips the wrappings from his leg when he grows faint with exhaustion in the early hours of the afternoon, when on any other well-rested day he could be expected to carry out hours and hours more of efficient work. It smells foul, and does not appear pleasing to the eye.

The small swell of hope in Piranesi’s chest disappears like the receding Tide and he steadies himself against the bulwark of the Statue at his back. The fire in his leg burns him to his very marrow and only seems to grow when fanned by the Air, and he quickly rewraps it for sheer terror. Once out of sight, the pain seems easier to manage, and Piranesi redirects his mind to the preparations and calculations he will need to make if he is to withstand this Infection. It may consume several days or _weeks_ , and he grows faint at the thought. Fainter.

His Table of Tides is thankfully easily retrieved from the Second Northern Hall, and as Piranesi settles heavily on his bed, he finds, to much relief, that his Hall will stay bare and dry for a month and more. If he has not overcome the infection by then, Piranesi thinks, then he will be Dead. He hopes it does not come to that. 

He has dried seaweed for food to sustain him for perhaps half of that time. Dried fish for several days. And Fresh Water, that if continuing to cascade down from the Heavens, will last him for ever. With a heavy sigh that feels much akin to giving up, Piranesi closes and shelves his Journal and lies down in his bed for an afternoon nap. He resolves to wake for dinner.

When he next awakes, Piranesi forgets for a moment where he is. Where the House has always protected him with its soothing Seas, he comes to in a void devoid of sound and panics. The barest moment passes, before the Sea crashes over him once more, but instead of bringing salt and fish and Tides, he smells smoke and metal. The world rocks under his feet with the vibration of a thousand Giants, and Piranesi weeps. He thinks of the familiar white and grey hues of his own Halls and opens his eyes to violent red and blue and orange-yellow, and the sight is so jarring and abhorrently unnatural that he must close his eyes once more. 

The Grace of the House offers him but one gift. Piranesi reaches gratefully for it, eyes blind and arms outstretched like a newborn and with his leg so, so free of pain. He can dance across the marble Floors once more and scale the Walls of Statues, and he tries to visualise such scenes, brow furrowed, while the world around him screams and torments him with Bewilderment.

A harsh incessant beeping so unlike any bird-call he has ever heard then radiates from his right, and Piranesi stumbles to his newly-born knees. The House does not hear its call and so the bird remains unplacated. Deafening.

When he next awakes, Piranesi is awash in tides that are not his own as the sky sparks and cracks with great force. With no Ceilings to shelter him, Piranesi is left to float and float and float, and when he finally gazes upon the horizon, it is a dark line that splits the sky-and-earth from ear to ear. His legs, both, are numbed by the freezing foreign saltwater.

When he next awakes –

When he next awakes, Piranesi finds, in some astonishment, that his bedding has transformed into the lush green of a Far-off Hall, one where the walls must be dense with creepers and beds cushioned by vines. The floor is dirt-hewn and strewn with leaves, and as he pads, bare-foot, a path forms itself before him, chequered with occasional stones that are smooth and flat under his feet. The path widens and widens until the greenery forms but an offhanded curtain in his peripheral vision and he gazes – no, squints – no, unbearably closes his eyes to the searing light of a foreign sun.

He misses the marble white of the House.

But there is no time for missing and there is no time for rest, and Piranesi finds himself endlessly treading and wading and wandering Far-Distant Places, until his feet must grow blistered and his soles bloody. Until he scarcely recalls the House, and with this realisation he curses his feeble mind and summons in his thoughts the Eighty-Second North-Eastern Hall, the Thirteenth Vestibule, the Statue of – the statue of…

The man finds him starfished in an ankle-deep pool. Piranesi chases floaters across the blue canvas of the ceiling, until a head blots out of his sun and a face, old and wrinkled and male, greets him with a stern, ‘Young man.’

‘I - I am,” Piranesi answers. ‘Sir,’ he appends, because the instinct arises in him.

‘Get up from there.’

‘I can’t, sir.’ He shakes his head, though it too feels liquid and much-congealed like the pool beneath him. Mud, or perhaps water? A mixture of the two, now seeped into his hair and skin and clothes.

‘Get up.’

He gets up.

‘Good. Now come with me.’

‘I can’t, sir.’ Though now elevated to standing height, Piranesi can still only make out the pool at his feet. Thick and muddy-brown and concealing his feet from the ankles down. They are not cold, but at a temperature that must match the earth at his feet – as the pool hardly _feels_ on his skin.

‘That wasn’t a question.’ The old man sounds irritated, though he watches Piranesi keenly, with full focus. ‘Come with me; I need to show you something.’

Piranesi follows without question. He is standing in a garden, beside the old man, on an unkempt lawn of grass set in the grey rain facing a mosaic of rose bushes. They are gold and apricot and red and pink, and the old man is talking. His mouth is red and alive and opening in a stream of words that flow unheard past Piranesi’s ears, but he can glean their importance from the intelligent sparkle in the old man’s eyes.

He watches and listens and nods.

‘Good lad.’ The man clasps a forceful hand to Piranesi’s shoulder and he nearly unbalances. ‘Now come inside. With me.’

Piranesi follows a respectful half-step behind the old man, as he strides towards the roses where they bloom great and bright and sprout suddenly into arching doorways. The doors encircle the pair of them, though Piranesi is loath to think of them as ‘two’, and more as ‘myself’ and ‘The Old Man’, and the old man appears to choose one door at random, stepping through it as the archway fades from apricot-gold-red-pink to a bleached bone-white. Piranesi follows.

The garden vanishes. The rain dries on his skin, the mud peels from his hair, and the scabs fall from his feet. He is Whole again and standing in the Vestibule of the Great House. The First of many.

‘Thank you,’ Piranesi cries, falling to his knees the newborn Fawn though he does not know what compels him to do so, and the Old Man simply watches in silence as he lavishes gratitude to his leather shoes and argyle socks and stained trouser hems. ‘Thank you!’

‘Get up,’ the Old Man commands, and this time Piranesi does so immediately. He waits, buoyed by the lightness in his soles, for the next instruction.

‘Return to your Halls.’

‘I –’

‘You are not well. Return to your Halls.’

‘I am –?’ Piranesi meets this with confusion, and the Floor feels unfamiliar under his tentative feet as he glances between the Old Man and the Doorways of the First Vestibule, waiting.

The Old Man raises an imperious brow, to chastise him for his hesitance. ‘Go. To your Halls. What are you waiting for?’

Piranesi does not know. He extricates himself from the Aura of the Old Man and walks North, following that familiar path to his bed in the corner of the Third Northern Hall. When he lies down, he does not awake again for a long time.

When he next wakes up, head clear of fog and leg no longer rent in two with pain, Piranesi takes stock of his surroundings and finds himself cradled in the loving arms of the Statue of a Man in Supplication, some metres above his bed. His skin is wracked with sudden shivers as he remembers his sleeping bag and his stomach crawls with a week-long hunger. Weakly, he climbs down from the Man’s arms and quenches his thirst with food and Fresh Water.

Still he feels faint and wracked with exhaustion, but when he gazes around him only to find the familiar Crevices and Faces of the House, Piranesi feels only gratitude for the gift of Life.

**Author's Note:**

> blood and water are not immiscible im just tryna be poetic or sum shit  
> comments greatly appreciated so i know im not screaming into the void!
> 
> [tumblr](https://swummeng-geys.tumblr.com)  
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/hashtag_yikes)


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